From D to D, Chapter 5 (Continued): The 198 Methods

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. Blessedly, these exploiters have suffered a setback as a result of the beginning of the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.  However, it would be a mistake for those who are members of historically oppressed groups in the United States to take the incoming Biden administration as a permanent state of affairs in the United States.  Nor should the incoming administration be regarded as permission for these groups to become lazy or complacent.  As the Good Book says, "Do not trust in princes, in a son of a man in whom there is no salvation."  A world free from the tyranny of the few, a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples - this world will not magically come into being by itself.  We who are among the oppressed must still organize or die.  

Recent posts of this series have focused on Chapter 5 of From D to D, titled, "Exercising Power."  This chapter describes some of the characteristics and features of nonviolent power when it is deployed by a group engaged in a liberation struggle.  One point which is mentioned in the chapter is that a nonviolent struggle works through various methods of struggle.  As Sharp says, "The use of a considerable number of these methods - carefully chosen, applied persistently and on a large scale, wielded in the context of a wise strategy and appropriate tactics, by trained civilians - is likely to cause any illegitimate regime severe problems.  This applies to all dictatorships."  This also applies to all other types of agents of oppression as well, including corporations and other holders of concentrated wealth and entrenched privilege.

A list of 198 identified methods of nonviolent struggle is provided in an appendix to From D to D.  Part 2 of Gene Sharp's three part work The Politics of Nonviolent Action elaborates on each of these methods and describes cases both of success and of failure in the uses of the various methods.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that I am still studying these cases, so I cannot provide a definitive analysis of the entire package of methods as described by Sharp.  However, I can draw a few lessons from the cases I have read.

The first observation is that those methods which are reactionary - that is, methods which arise spontaneously as a reaction to a sudden threat - often fail to immediately achieve any lasting change.  This applies especially to the methods which are categorized under "Protest and Persuasion."  Cases of such failures include the failures of spontaneous protest or of spontaneous organization of parallel institutions in Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the 1968 invasion by Russian troops.  Although the emergence of these protests and institutions temporarily (and significantly!) slowed the Soviet Russian consolidation of control, they ultimately collapsed.  However, these actions created a residue of "cause-consciousness" among people that could then be amplified by subsequent actions.  Those actions which are undertaken merely to register dissatisfaction or to blow off steam often fail to achieve anything.  A case in point is that of a farmer who lived near the Miramar Naval Air Station in the 1960's.  He was so angered by the constant jet noise from the base that he used a tractor to plow the word QUIET in large letters in his field.  The base did not become quieter, however.

Those methods which are deployed under the guidance of a wise grand strategy of resistance or liberation (or which emerge as part of a larger struggle with a larger strategic goal) tend to be more successful.  Those people who are part of a liberation struggle that wants to accomplish more than just blowing off steam must therefore examine each method they choose to assess its total contribution to the liberation struggle and its total effect - both immediate and long-term - on the oppressor group.  It must be remembered that the existence of an oppressed group and of an oppressor group is due to a fundamental imbalance of power that exists between oppressor and oppressed.  A fundamental goal of a liberation struggle is therefore either to deliver the oppressed out of the power of the oppressor or to correct the imbalance of power so that the oppressor can no longer oppress.  Some questions to ask regarding methods are as follows:

• Does the method under consideration strengthen the oppressed group - either by communicating and spreading cause-consciousness, or by creating more cohesive bonds between members of the struggle group, or by meeting actual material or social needs of the struggle group?

• Does the method under consideration apply effective pressure to the oppressor?  Note that in democratic or semi-democratic societies, large protest marches and rallies may not pose the same degree of threat or challenge to existing authority as such rallies would pose in a more totalitarian society.  However, such rallies (and other acts of protest and persuasion such as sending symbolic objects to authorities) may sometimes indeed be perceived as a credible threat to established power even in "democratic" societies, as was seen in the heavy-handed police response to Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests which took place in the U.S. and elsewhere in 2020.  Note also that the protests now occurring in Russia against the arrest of Alexei Navalny are an example of the susceptibility of brittle authoritarian regimes to disruption by mass protest.  See this and this also.  It seems that Putin may be losing his grip!  Note, however, that a key to the success of the Russian protest movement will lie in whether or not the protestors are willing to maintain nonviolent discipline.  Violence by the protestors against police will only strengthen Putin's pillars of support and make it harder for the movement to achieve its goals.

• Does the oppressor possess methods or techniques which can neutralize the chosen methods of the nonviolent struggle group?  
• Remember that a major source of the strength of the nonviolent actionists is the contrast which they are able to present between themselves and their frequently violent oppressors.  If these oppressors can inject an element of violence into a nonviolent method used by the nonviolent struggle group, the oppressors can damage the credibility of the nonviolent group.  This happened with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.  Although 93 percent of the protests were completely nonviolent, white agents provocateurs were able to inject violence into the remaining protests, which drew disproportionate media coverage and enabled police to justify extremely heavy-handed action against protestors.  (See this and this, for instance.)  This violence also led over time to a decrease in support for the BLM protests.  Had the BLM protests shifted to methods and venues that precluded the injection of violence, things might have been different.  On the other hand, the protests for Navalny and against Putin are taking place in a context in which Putin's repertoire of countermeasures is becoming increasingly powerless.  Therefore the protests are having a significant impact.

• In addition to injecting violence into a method of nonviolent action, what else can an oppressor do to render the action ineffective?  Three cases come to mind.  Two of these cases were mentioned by Sharp in Part 2 of The Politics of Nonviolent Action.  In one case, during the Sino-Soviet conflict of the late 1960's, a platoon of Chines soldiers began to march to the Russian border every day in order to make a rude gesture toward the Russians.  This gesture involved, shall we say, "partial disrobing."  However, the Russians eventually stopped these gestures when one morning they set up large pictures of Chairman Mao facing the Chinese side of the border.  From that day on, the Chinese soldiers kept their clothes on.  In another case, when faced with hunger strikes by political prisoners, the British government would release these prisoners when they became weak from fasting, then re-arrest them once their strength had recovered.  This became an effective means of breaking hunger strikes.  In much more recent times, the government of Indian Hindu ultra-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi has neutralized the power of hunger strikes by untouchables in India.  His solution: simply to let people die; that is, to refuse to care whether they die or not.

• Is the method under consideration the only method which the nonviolent struggle group intends to use, or is it part of a larger suite of diverse methods?  As was written by a science fiction writer I read back when I was a kid, "a one trick fighter is easy to whip if you know two, and I know half a hundred."  Reliance on only one method of action was the great weakness of the BLM protests last year.  

• Does the chosen method contribute to the ultimate strategic goal of the struggle group?  If not, it may be a waste of time from a strategic standpoint.

• Lastly, is the chosen method within the ability of the struggle group at a particular point in time and a particular stage of the struggle?  For instance, if I send a thousand letters to various radio and TV stations, newspapers, and online media outlets announcing that on April 1, 2021, I will instigate a six-week total boycott of Hostess Twinkies as an act of protest against (write whatever grievance you want in this space: _____________________), I'd better have the organizational capacity to deliver on the threat if I don't want to look like a fool come April 2nd.  

As can be seen, the choice of appropriate methods for a nonviolent liberation struggle involves a careful assessment of the potential and drawbacks of each potential method under consideration, as well as a careful understanding of the history of the use of each of these potential methods.  The choice of the appropriate methods of struggle is therefore influenced by the development of an appropriate strategy of struggle.  The next post in this series will, God willing, therefore begin an exploration of Chapter 6 of From D to D, titled, "The Need For Strategic Planning."

A New Day, And A Blue Tie!

 

Public domain image taken from Wikimedia Commons

Public domain image taken from Wikimedia Commons

Welcome, President Biden and Vice-President Harris!  My prayers are with you!

From D to D, Chapter 5: Dealing With Infiltrators

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. Among the crimes committed by this select few was the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on the 6th of this month in an attempt to prevent Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris from being certified by the U.S. Congress as the legitimate winners of the U.S. Presidential election held in November of 2020.  Though that attempt failed, these who lust for their own supremacy are continuing to organize and to plot how they can maintain their own supremacy by disenfranchising, dispossessing and oppressing everyone else.  Therefore, it is up to us who are not counted among the "chosen few" to learn to organize ourselves in order to thwart the power of the few and to ensure the emergence of a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples.

A previous post in this series stated that a group of oppressed people who organize to nonviolently liberate themselves from oppression can exercise great power if they organize themselves and their struggle according to high moral and ethical principles combined with wise strategy. For these principles and this strategy can amplify the contrast between the oppressed struggle group and the members of the corrupt oppressor group. This combination of high principles and wise strategy is also the most effective means of shifting the balance of social power away from the oppressors. For this reason, oppressors who understand the power and potential of strategic nonviolent resistance are very interested in doing all they can to render that resistance ineffective.  The most recent post in this series explored the use of the agent provocateur as the tool of choice used by oppressors in order to render a nonviolent struggle ineffective.  

The power of a nonviolent movement derives from the high moral and ethical principles of the movement participants and from the resulting contrast between these participants and the members of the oppressive regime.  The greater this contrast is, the stronger the nonviolent movement and its actionists are.  Therefore the role of the agent provocateur is to infiltrate a nonviolent movement in order to tempt the members of that organization to commit violent or otherwise illegal activities (in order to discredit the organization and legitimize the use of State violence against its members), or to cause the organization to fall apart by making false accusations about certain of its members to the rest of the membership.  Some cases of the use of these agents were cited in the most recent post in this series.  There are certainly other cases as well.  (For further reading, you can start with "Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the Informant," or, "Agents Provocateurs as a Type of Faux Activist," both by Gary T. Marx.  There are also the posts I have written about violent white infiltrators at Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.)  As a result of the activities of these agents over the last several months, broad American support for the right to engage in mass protest has been declining (although most of that decline has occurred among people who identify as Republican).

So then the natural question is, how can organizers of a movement or of a movement campaign guard against the threat of infiltrators?  I'd like to suggest that the answer to that question depends on the attitude which movement participants have toward the likely costs of living in truth.  For I believe, based on my reading of the Bible and of various books on the dehumanizing nature of oppression, that it is the duty of people everywhere to resist oppression, and therefore to resist the oppressor.  This is true even when such resistance is undertaken against one's own oppressors.  The Biblical command to love one's enemies does not negate the Biblical requirement for the oppressed to speak truth to power, including the power of their oppressors.  As Paulo Freire states in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the resistance against the oppressor by the oppressed is an act of love, in that this resistance provides the oppressor with an opportunity to recover his own humanity - a humanity which he damaged when he chose to become an oppressor.  This is why Harriet Beecher Stowe's depiction of the so-called "Christianity" of Uncle Tom is in fact not Christian.

But since this resistance is to be nonviolent, it takes on a certain character which requires certain  characteristics in and among the resisters. The nature of this resistance is captured in the Greek word hypomone (ὑπομονή, meaning "an act of remaining behind", "an act of holding out," "enduring to do"), and is illustrated by such New Testament passages as Revelation 3:7-13.  Resisters remain behind and hold out by holding forth the truth in the face of hostile and violent opposition.  Part of the resistance of these resisters consists of remaining nonviolent even as they resist.  (As it says in the Good Book, "Here is the hypomone and the faith of the saints.")  Because the nature of this resistance requires resisters to live in truth even though they will be punished for it, and to refuse to retaliate against the punishment, this kind of resistance requires a special courage - a willingness to abandon fear (even the fear of death), or at least to control fear so that it is not the overriding force controlling a resister.  This is pointed out by Gene Sharp in From D to D (pages 33-34), How Nonviolent Struggle Works (HNVSW) (pages 53-54, 62-64), and Part 3 of The Politics of Nonviolent Action (pages 456-458, 481-492).

Those who have not achieved this fearlessness and willingness to openly bear the cost of living in truth will be tempted to try to use secrecy and internal conspiracy to guard their movement against infiltration.  Such people may attempt to create movements that have a "healthy security culture" as described in an essay which appeared on the website of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict titled "Insider Threats: A Closer Look at Infiltrators and Movement Security Culture."  Such a "security culture" will inevitably limit the ability of potential participants to contribute as much as they are capable of contributing to the movement.  Such a culture will also hinder the democratic nature of what is supposed to be a movement for liberation, and will introduce a potentially authoritarian element into the movement, as in leaders telling subordinates to "Do x and y.  Don't ask why; just do it!  Because I said so!"  And there is the problem of what to do once an infiltrator is outed within a movement organization.  Will the infiltrator have gained access to sensitive information?  Will the information be of such a nature that "If I told ya, I'd have to kill ya"?  (Killing informers is not very non-violent, is it?!)  Note that there is a very, very high likelihood that the oppressor will be able to infiltrate your organization and obtain just such information, no matter how hard you try to prevent it.  It happened frequently during the anti-Tsarist uprisings in Russia in 1905, during some of the labor strikes in Britain and the United States in the 1800's and 1900's, and among the resisters against Nazi rule in World War Two.  Total secrecy is wickedly hard to achieve.  Lastly, how will movement secrecy limit the ability of movement organizers to build a truly strong, durable and intelligent mass movement?  Gene Sharp notes that during the history of the Indian liberation struggle against the British, campaigns that relied on secrets and conspiracies tended to collapse before they ever became powerful.

On the other hand, movement organizers can choose to build a movement that can survive, thrive and prevail even though the oppressor knows everything about it.  Building such a movement involves the following steps:

• Choose an ultimate strategic goal that is utterly good and utterly blameless.  For instance, if an ultimate goal of your movement is the creation of a society in which everyone has an equal share of the rights and resources needed to fulfill his or her own human potential, no one can legitimately object to that.  If on the other hand, your ultimate strategic goal is the creation of a society in which you get to indulge evil and harmful pleasures at the expense of others, try to be as secret in your intentions as possible, since if you are open about them, your intended victims will sooner or later begin to organize against you.  If your organization exists to harm others, beware also of infiltrators, since they will at the least tip off your intended victims!  
• Create a movement strategy that does not depend on secrecy for its success.  This will be easy if your movement goal is utterly blameless.  If on the other hand, you have formed an organization whose goals can be summarized by slogans such as "Child Molesters Of The World, Unite!" or "People for the Torture of Animals," creating a strategy that does not depend on secrecy will be much harder.
• Your movement goals and strategy should not involve physical harm, sabotage, or property destruction.  Then if informers or other agents discover it, they will not be able to accuse you of any intentions of wrongdoing.
• Your movement goals and strategy should include a road map for building up your oppressed brothers and sisters through your own self-reliance.  This will show that you are actively managing your own affairs for good, and will neutralize the oppressor's claims that you need to be oppressed because you are disorderly or shiftless or lazy.
• Once you have created your movement goals and strategy, make them known to as many people as possible.  This will put informers and other agents out of work, as there will be nothing left for them to inform on.  And if a provocateur comes to cause trouble, you can point to him and say, "Remember the strategy we publicized.  This man does not represent our brand!"  You will be believed if you have made your strategy open and have conducted yourself honorably and with high moral and ethical standards.  To quote Jawaharlal Nehru (a contemporary of Gandhi), "Above all, we had a sense of freedom and a pride in that freedom. The old feeling of oppression and frustration was completely gone.  There was no more whispering, no round-about legal phraseology to avoid getting into trouble with the authorities. We said what we felt and shouted it out from the house tops. What did we care for the consequences?  Prison? We looked forward to it; that would help our cause still further. The innumerable spies and secret-service men who used to surround us and follow us about became rather pitiable individuals as there was nothing secret for them to discover. All our cards were always on the table."  (Quote taken from HNVSW, pages 63-64.)  
• Do not seek to grow too quickly.  Quality is much more important than quantity at the beginning, and high quality is the most durable way to obtain high quantities of powerful participants.  This is yet another reason why the sort of hastily thrown-together mass protests that have characterized the second decade of the 21st century do not represent real power.  When one man teaches a small group, and that group learns its lessons well enough that each of its members can in turn skillfully teach others, you have the beginnings of real power.

Such openness will aid the creation of a movement that is extremely durable and powerful.  On the other hand, a climate of secrecy not only promotes fear and dampens the movement, but it also makes the movement vulnerable to the second kind of agent provocateur: the infiltrator who sabotages a movement by spreading false accusations against movement leaders in order to foster distrust between the members of a movement organization.  This is why when Cesar Chavez began organizing what would become the United Farm Workers Union, he rejected secrecy and made his organization open.  

P.S. For an example of the hypomone mentioned above, consider the case of Clarence Jordan and Koinonia Farm during the 1950's and 1960's.  Jordan was a white evangelical preacher - yet when you consider what he did and what he stood for, you can see that he really "got" Christianity, because he was a real Christian.  Too bad that the modern white American evangelical church no longer has such people as Clarence and his wife Florence.

The Value Of A Clean Shirt

Pardon my recent talkative streak, but the events of the last week have me on a roll.  Those who are regular readers of this blog and of my essays on strategic nonviolent resistance know how I have stressed the vital importance of maintaining nonviolent discipline among the members of a social movement.  I have also stated how the introduction of violence into a movement drastically increases the likelihood that the movement will fail.  These insights did not originate from me, but they are the result of years of painstaking research and analysis by such social scientists as Jamila Raqib, Gene Sharp, Erica Chenoweth, Maria Stephan, Srdja Popovic, and others.

The violent attempted takeover of the U.S. Capitol by white supremacists and white evangelicals proves my point.  The violence which was instigated by Donald Trump has spectacularly backfired against him.  As a result of national revulsion and disgust over last week's rampage, Mr. Trump is on the verge of losing everything as the businesses that propped up his commercial empire abandon him and criminal prosecutors begin to surround him.  The Republican Party is now reeling from a number of self-inflicted wounds that have resulted from their support of Trump.  And many members of Trump's white supremacist base have begun to turn on him, showing less that they actually believed in him than that he was, rather, merely the convenient vehicle for their unjustified grievances.  He functioned, as it were, merely as a telephone pole that was cut down to make a convenient battering ram.  Now that the pole is cracking, a growing number of his supporters are ready to kick him to the curb.  

But these supporters - sworn to violence as their chosen means of political change - are beginning to discover firsthand the weaknesses of political movements that rely on violence and lawlessness.  These weaknesses include the need for secrecy and conspiracy, the danger of backfire, and the risk of infiltration.  The dawning awareness of these risks is driving these people into an increasing paranoia which will greatly increase their difficulty in acting.  

None of this means that the next several months will be easy for the people who have been historical targets of oppression in the United States.  However, it does point out how the building of a nonviolent movement for social change - a movement both principled and strategic - can result in something much more powerful than that which thugs are able to build.  Hopefully, this weekend I will be able to continue my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  We'll see how it goes.  Unfortunately, some valuable time was eaten up today when I had to take one of my cats to the vet...

A Parasite Protection Plan

Many reputable media sources have mentioned the prominent role that white American evangelical and Protestant churches played in the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol last week.  These sources have also noted the prominent role which these churches are playing in the threat of violent white nationalist insurgency in the United States from now on.  This is interesting, given the fact that many of these churches have been ongoing recipients of funds authorized by Congress under the Payment Protection Plan instituted by the U.S. Government in response to financial hardships experienced by American businesses due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  It is also no secret that these churches should never have received these funds (due to the Constitutional separation of church and state as well as the Code of Federal Regulations), and that the only reason why they did is because of the influence of Donald Trump.  And a number of these churches have been guilty of misusing these funds, using them for legal fees incurred in defending the churches from sex abuse scandals, or for buying private jets.  See this, this and this also.

The question that naturally arises is this: why are American taxpayers (many of whom are people of color who are threatened by these far-right white supremacists) giving our tax dollars to organizations that want to violently take over the United States?  And why do churches continue to enjoy tax-exempt status?  At this late stage of the game, what value do these groups actually provide to the American people?  They have shown themselves to be utterly unreliable as a moral compass.  As a moral restraint, they are about as worthless as a set of burned-out brakes on a runaway semi truck.  (For those readers who care about the defense of Biblical doctrine, why are white evangelicals joining forces with Nazi New Age shamans in their pursuit of white supremacy?  See this also.  Doesn't sound very Christian to me.  Remember what I said about the syncretism of these white supremacists?)  Why should they continue to receive free money in order to threaten the rest of us?  Why are U.S. taxpayers being required to give money to religious talking heads such as the Family Research Council, Ralph Reed, or Franklin Graham?

Farewell to YouTube

I find myself once again in a somewhat familiar position this week.  Over the years, I have been exposed to things that tasted or felt so good that partaking of them quickly became a habit.  However, as time passed, I began to notice that the things which had become habits had some unavoidable downsides - downsides which eventually became too great to ignore.  Thus it was that I was forced eventually and reluctantly to give them up.  Examples include television, sugary sweets, coffee (except in small doses) and talk radio.

This week, YouTube joins that list.  This has been a long time coming.  I have tuned in to YouTube primarily to hear and watch a number of insanely awesome fingerstyle guitar players.  But during the last year - a very traumatic year! - it seemed to me that YouTube's algorithms were deliberately seeking to amplify trauma by showing links to politically provocative videos in their "Recommended For You" sidebar.  I have no idea why these videos were "recommended for me" especially when I think of how most of them were either racist, right-wing, or linked to conspiracy theories.  Perhaps the people at Google thought that by showing me things that are offensive, threatening, terrorizing and outrageous, they could get more pageviews, and hence, earn more advertising revenue.

They were wrong.

The final straw for me has come in learning that YouTube is dragging its feet in removing Donald Thug Trump's YouTube channel - even after the attempted violent seizure of the U.S. Congress by Trump's band of church-going thugs.  Note to these thugs: there is no "grace for your hearts."  Rather, what you can expect for yourselves is spelled out in Hebrews 10:26-31.  You body-slammed police officers; you bashed police officers in the head; you came with guns, zip-ties, rope, racist slogans and rhetoric; you planted pipe bombs; you came ready to murder.  Don't ever again try to give me Bible lessons.  You don't know what you're talking about.

And as for YouTube, I will find alternatives.  But I won't be coming back.

Cleaning Up A Week of Broken Glass

I'm in the process of gathering more information for the next post in my series on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, so today's post will not be a continued exposition of Chapter 5.  I do, however, want to make a few more comments on the attempted takeover of the U.S. Congress by pro-Trump thugs this past week.  

First, we now know that the mob that assaulted the Capitol had been preparing its action for weeks.  We also know that the mob had been preparing to abduct members of Congress at gunpoint and bind them with zip ties and rope.  We know that most of the organizing and coordinating between the various thugs who assaulted the Capitol had taken place online, in full view of the FBI and the Capitol police.  We now also know for a fact that white American evangelicals and their pastors comprised a large part of the mob.  We also know that similar mobs stormed a California county house and surrounded a number of state houses last week.  We know that several Republican lawmakers (such as this man) joined in the call to commit violence.  We now know that pro-Trump fascists and other persons associated with the Far Right have infiltrated many police departments across the United States.  (See this, this, and this for instance.)  We know that some of these officers traveled to Washington DC last week to join the riot.

And we know that those who orchestrated last week's trouble are making plans - in plain sight - to do it again.  

So how to respond to all of this?  If you're like me, your first reaction is likely to feel a great and terrible anger - an indignation which has an element of righteousness to it, yet which leads to rash errors if not properly guided and handled.  That anger can lead to moralizing, which is both an innocuous response and a rather useless one.  The people who orchestrated last week's events have no morals, no better angels that anyone can appeal to.  They will be deaf to your sermons.  So that leads to the second of several possible reactions: the urge to go to the streets and organize counter-demonstrations against the fascists!  But there is a problem with this approach, namely, that the fascists, like a pack of rabid dogs, are keen to provoke violence.  If they succeed by their violence in provoking you to counter-violence, you become part of the problem.  (Unfortunately, this has already started to happen.  Remember what I wrote a while back about relying on mass protest rallies?)

So let's consider the third response: to construct a strategy for nonviolently shifting the balance of power away from those who want to dominate the rest of us.  Consider the following perspective from Part 1 of Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action: that the source of armed conflict between various groups of people is the belief that political power is like a solid, durable stone that can be possessed only by the strongest and most violent members of society.  This belief is false, however.  And the power of an oppressor can be disintegrated by a people who build their own social power and withdraw their consent from the oppressor.  

This is good news.  I consider myself a fundamentalist Christian, which means that unlike the vast majority of white American evangelicals, I believe I'm supposed to obey the Sermon on the Mount and not physically threaten my fellow human beings.  (This is why I don't own a gun.)  However, I know that there are tens of millions of white American evangelicals who stand ready "in the name of Jesus" to harm, oppress, and even kill their fellow human beings.  Yet they comprise a continually shrinking minority of the population.  This means that their power is declining.  This is especially true when one considers that the power they claim does not consist of knowing how to do useful things that benefit their fellow human beings.  Rather, it consists almost entirely in the assault rifles that many of them openly carry everywhere like pacifiers or security blankets, without which they would feel like ghosts upon the earth.  Those of the oppressed who do choose to build the power that comes from knowing how to do useful, meaningful work will therefore go far.  Consider the constructive example of the  Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado.  Consider Titus 3:14.  And don't let the terror which your oppressor seeks to instill divert you from patiently building your power by the daily practice of beautifully good work.  To put it another way, don't let these evil people get inside your OODA loop.

There is more good news: Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple have surgically removed Donald Trump's metaphorical mouth.  He can't post garbage online, and the Parler site has been denied access to the Google Store.  Lastly, I just want to say God Bless Arnold Schwarzenegger!  Just when I was ready to write off all Republicans as irredeemably evil, former Governor Schwarzenegger has forced me to eat my words.  And get this: he is leading an initiative to restore voting access to as many disenfranchised Americans as possible.  (See this and this also.)